The Pirate Cinema creates art from torrent traffic

It’s an open secret that BitTorrent makes up a large segment of internet traffic. People all over the world are torrenting legal and copyrighted content 24-hours a day. A new art installation seeks to turn that simple fact of the digital peer-to-peer world into a visual experience. It’s called The Pirate Cinema, and you can see a sampling of it right now. Keep in mind, this is the internet we’re talking about here, so there is some mildly NSFW content in The Pirate Cinema.
What you see on the screens is a sampling of the most popular torrents as indexed by The Pirate Bay’s top 100 list. Each snippet is a tiny segment of data from the full torrent. The BitTorrent protocol splits large files up into small packets so the necessary parts of the file can be transferred more efficiently to other peers that need that particular section.
The torrent process is nonlinear, thus the flashes of video projected on the screens are grainy and artefacted blips from the middle of the original content. It cuts in and out in a mesmerizing way with sound crackling to life, then bleeding into the next clip. Sometimes it’s a recognizable bit of a music video, movie, or TV show. But other times it’s just an unrecognizable freeze-frame with blaring sound. Yes, porn also is part of the mix.
The Pirate Cinema runs with custom automated software running on Mac Minis that intercepts packets from actual BitTorrent file transfers and projects them on the screen in real time. The system also makes use of Python, Libtorrent, Xubuntu, and Gstreamer to make the magic happen.
Perhaps most fascinating (and a little creepy), The Pirate Cinema includes the IP address the currently playing file segment was sent from and to. This is possible because BitTorrent transfers happen in the open where any connected peer can see the entire swarm’s IP addresses. It might be a little off-putting, but it’s also fascinating.
Now read: BitTorrent preps secure, private Dropbox alternative called Sync
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Twitter creates incredible maps using billions of geotagged tweets

AppId is over the quota

Every tweet that hits Twitter has the option of including location data with it. These coordinates, which are of varying accuracy given the device and circumstances under which they were sent, can be used to add flavor to a tweet, or give its readers important context about the information contained in those 140 characters. If you are an engineer at Twitter though, you can round up all that location data and create something awesome with it.

Using the longitude and latitude information attached to billions of tweets the Visual Insights team at Twitter was able to create maps of where tweets were sent. And due to the sheer number of data points — again, billions of them — the result was a series of awesomely accurate maps of the population centers and thoroughfares of the tweeting world.

As seen in the gallery above, enough geotagged tweets are sent that we can get a really good idea of where people tweet from in certain countries, including all of Europe and the United States, and then the in major cities of Brazil, South Korea, Australia, Japan, Turkey, and Russia.

Where people tweet from seems to be roughly representative of where they live, work, and play (especially once you drop in a few million dots and zoom way out). That in turns gives us a good idea of tweet density and the popularity of Twitter usage. This means when looking at large map we see the Twitter centers, such as Paris, as well as the spiderweb of arteries (suburbs, highways, and railways) emerging from those places. The method of creation might seem roundabout, about the end result couldn’t be more simple.

Interestingly, there are a large number of seemingly randomly placed data points in the middle of the world’s bodies of waters. These don’t form the patterns you’d expect, but the points do give us some idea of people’s travel from one land mass to the next. This can best be seen in the map of New York City; lower Manhattan has no bridges going to its south west side, but it does have tunnels and boats. By looking closely at the full-size image you can clearly see downtown’s tunnels, piers, and boat lanes.

The full city list, as well as original images, is available on Flickr.

Now read: GoogleFaces: An algorithm that scans Maps for the Earth’s face-like structures

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